infantile;--that is
best proved by their own words, their own scale of things; but it is
necessary to insist that in these travellers we have comparatively
enlarged experience and knowledge; and as comparison is the only test of
any age, or of any man therein, the very blunders and limitations of the
past, as we see them to be, have a constant, as well as an historical,
value to us. That is, we are always being reminded, first, how we have
come to the present mastery over nature, over ourselves, over all being;
and, secondly, how imperfect, how futile, our work is still, and seems
always doomed to be, if judged from a really final standpoint, or rather
from our own dreams of the ultimately possible.

So if in the case of our mediaeval travellers their interests are the
very reverse of ours; if they take delight in brooding over thoughts
which to us do not seem worth the thinking; if their minds seem to rest
as much on fable implicitly accepted as on the little amount of
experienced fact necessary for a working life, it will not be for us to
judge, or to pity, or to despise the men who were making our world for
us, and through whose work we live.

[Illustration: THE MAPPE-MONDE OF ST. SEVER. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]

Especially we cannot afford to forget this as we reach the lowest point
of the fortunes, the mental and material work and position and
outlook, of Europe and Christendom. A half-barbarised world had entered
upon the inheritance of a splendid past, but it took centuries before
that inheritance was realised by the so altered present. In this time of
change we have men writing in the language of Caesar and Augustine, of
Alexander and Plato and Aristotle, who had been themselves, or whose
fathers had been, pirates, brigands, nomades,--"wolves of the land or of
the sea"--to Greeks or Romans of the South; who had been even to the
Romanised provincials of the North, as in Britain, mere "dogs," "whelps
from the kennel of barbarism," the destroyers of the order of the world.
The boundless credulity and servile terror, the superstition and feudal
tyranny of the earlier Middle Ages, mark the first stage of the
reconstruction of society, when savage strong men who had conquered were
set down beside the overworked and outworn masters of the Western world,
to learn of them, and to make of them a more enduring race.

CHAPTER II.

VIKINGS OR NORTHMEN.

CIRCA 787-1066.

The discoveries and conquests and colonies